Strange Loop

Airplane-Mode HTML5: Is your website mobile-ready?

Apple sold 4.1 million Macs in Q4 of 2010 -- an impressive number until you consider that they sold 7.3 million iPads, 9.1 million iPods, and 16.3 millions iPhones in the same timeframe. IDC reports that smartphones outsold desktop PCs across the board for the first time in history, and the trend is expected to continue in 2011.

The mobile web is here, and this talk aims to help you get your website up to speed. You can make some subtle tweaks to your existing website to make it more mobile friendly -- accounting for the smaller viewport screen size, providing layouts for both portrait and landscape mode, and making your hyperlinks mobile-friendly. Or you can optimize it a lot by providing a dedicated website that leverages HTML5 local storage, application cache, and more.

As the mobile ecosystem continues to grow and fragment with devices from smartphones to tablets -- running iOS, Android, WebOS, and everything else -- having a coherent mobile web strategy can help smooth out the bumps and move you from a "one size fits all" mentality to a more adaptive, right-sized approach to web development.

Scott Davis

ThirstyHead

Scott Davis is the founder of ThirstyHead.com, a training and consulting company that that specializes in leading-edge technology solutions like HTML 5, NoSQL, Groovy, and Grails. Scott has been writing about web development for over 10 years. His books include JBoss at Work (O'Reilly), The Google Maps API (Pragmatic Bookshelf), GIS for Web Developers (Pragmatic Bookshelf), Groovy Recipes (Pragmatic Bookshelf), and Getting Started with Grails (InfoQ). Scott is also the author of two popular article series at IBM developerWorks -- Mastering Grails and Practically Groovy.